


no rapunzel she

by Siria



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-24
Updated: 2011-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-28 01:23:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/302178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>St Evangeline's wasn't a bad school.</p>
            </blockquote>





	no rapunzel she

**Author's Note:**

  * For [freneticfloetry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/freneticfloetry/gifts).



Her brothers had gone to Harrow, of course, but by the time Peggy, the baby of the family, was ready for prep school, it was 1931 and her father could no longer afford Wycombe's or Cheltenham's fees. "Chin up, Peg," he said when he broke the news, looking as grey and worn as he had the day he'd announced they'd have to give up their house for something smaller in the town. "I know it's tough, old girl, being separated from Imogen and Florence like this, but St Evangeline's isn't a bad school and I'm sure you'll have lots of new friends in no time at all."

St Evangeline's wasn't a bad school. The other girls were quite chummy, the countryside around it was green and pleasant with scope for lots of good rambles, and the teachers generally fair with the amount of prep they gave each evening. Yet it was not a top-flight school, either; whether a girl passed her School Cert exams with flying colours or scrambled herself into a pass in mathematics, English and shorthand seemed a matter of complete indifference to most of the teachers. Pupils were drawn mostly from middling sorts of families—prosperous shop owners, the occasional doctor's daughter—the kind of family for whom it was both a real struggle and a matter of pride to say that _their_ girl attended a boarding school.

"We expect you girls to grow up to be the kinds of wives and mothers that the Empire needs," Miss Bronson was fond of saying. She was the principal, an older woman who always smelled vaguely of lavender mothballs, who kept a framed official photograph of the royal family on her desk and still disapproved of women with bobbed hair. She approved of neatly-darned stockings, because they showed industry and thrift; she encouraged everyone to take part in hockey and lacrosse, because team games built character.

Peggy was one of the few pupils to take archery when it was offered. She found something distinctly pleasurable in it, standing with her feet firmly planted against the earth, keeping her breathing controlled and steady in the moment before she let the arrow fly. Watching the arrowhead embed itself in the bull's-eye was its own satisfaction, an accomplishment which relied on no one else for its success. It was much more of a challenge than conjugating French verbs or remembering the correct layout for silverware during a formal dinner party. By the time she was seventeen, she could hit the bull's-eye at seventy yards three times in a row, and had calluses on her fingers from the bow strings.

In geography class, they made a special study of the parts of the globe shaded red, copying down from the blackboard neat lists of the principal exports of Canada, or the natural habitats to be found in the dominion of South Africa. Peggy wondered aloud what it would be like to visit India one day, or to sail as far as Australia—thinking privately that it sounded much more thrilling than a bedsitter and a secretarial job in London, or a semi-detached house in the suburbs and a commuter husband.

"Oh," Miss Cartwright said vaguely in response, "well, one always has the possibility to do such a thing, of course. I would miss England terribly, but there are so many bright young men in the Colonial Service, you know, or the Diplomatic Service. They do find it such a help to have a companion from home who is willing to sacrifice in order to provide him life's little comforts."

That evening, instead of attending evening study, Peggy crept quietly upstairs to the dorms and retrieved the scissors from her sewing kit. She sat in front of the mirror in the dim, chilly bathroom for a long moment. In its long, schoolgirl braid, her hair was a thick, heavy rope hanging over her shoulder and reaching as far as her waist. Peggy hesitated only for a moment before attacking it with the scissors—they were nowhere near sharp enough for the job, and it took her several minutes of hacking before the braid finally tumbled into her lap. The person who now stared back at her from the mirror was quite a different person: her hair hung in ragged, uneven curls that just about grazed her jawline and she looked, she realised, older. Expectant. She picked up the braid and dropped it into the wastebin, dusted herself down, and went back to the dorm, where she got under her bedcovers long before lights out, in the company of one of her illicit novels.

Sylvia Humphries was the first up to the dorm after evening study. She stared when she saw Peggy's hair, and then snorted. "Well, now you've gone and done it, Peg," she said, "if you cut off your hair, the Bronson will have your _scalp_."

"Gosh," Peggy said, slouching down further under the covers and ostentatiously turning the page, "well, now I'm told." Perhaps on their next Saturday trip into town, she would pop into Woolworth's and buy herself a tube of lipstick—if Bronson wanted St Evangeline's girls to have a reputation for being sporting, well, then let it never be said that Peggy Carter was not willing to go all in.


End file.
